


Wear Your Skin Like Iron

by dewinter



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 14:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Don't be a bitch. I could get arrested for this."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>In the end, that's exactly what happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wear Your Skin Like Iron

Elinor from HR takes him out and gets him horrendously, apocalyptically drunk on white wine, about a week after it all goes to shit with Connor.

‘Someone had to do something about –’ she waves a hand vaguely at his whole person ‘— _this,_ ’ she says, not unkindly. ‘Enough is enough. Plenty more fish. Drink up. Drown those sorrows.’

Oliver does what she says – he hasn’t really got the energy to do otherwise – and tries not to think about how there might not be plenty more fish, not for guys like him. And certainly no fish quite like Connor.

Elinor takes him home. They are both staggering. Before they pass out on Oliver’s unmade bed still in their work clothes, she makes him burn the tie Connor left there once, the only, lonely twisted-up remnant of the whole sorry mess. It’s a good thing she does, because it means that when the police come to search the place three days later, there’s no trace that Connor was ever there.

*

 _Cyber crime,_ they say, vaguely, frighteningly. Oliver can’t stop his hands from shaking. They leave him alone in a holding cell for hours. He wonders if they arrested Connor, too.

He deleted him from all his contacts – clicking that little _confirm_ button was meant to be satisfying, but instead it felt hollow, and tawdry, childish. And achieved nothing, in truth. They have left breadcrumbs behind them that will take more than the click of a button to erase. Digital echoes of whatever there was or wasn’t between them, tiny pinpricks of light, clusters of code. The parts of themselves that interacted in that other, online universe. Texts and emails and calls – _coming over later? – u don’t always have to sneak off u know –_ never quite saying what he meant, always falling way, way short, but still: permanent now, frozen. Those parts remain, traceable, incriminating, and the other parts – the texture of the skin behind Connor’s ear, the heat of his breath on the base of Oliver’s spine – the other parts have melted into air.

They ask him if he has a lawyer. No, he says, because lawyers have brought him nothing but trouble, lately. He could call his father, but his father will not understand. Has never understood.

*

The interrogation room is like the ones on TV. Low light, two-way mirror. Drab and small and full of stale air. His court-appointed lawyer is prematurely aged and his jacket is rumpled and stained. The cop that slumps into the seat across the table from them introduces himself, but Oliver misses his name. The tape starts playing. Lights, camera, action.

The cop slides a photo across the table. It’s a grainy, blueish CCTV still. Him and Connor, the night that they met, in the bar at the bottom of Oliver’s building. _Ah_. So this is how it will go. Oliver can’t bear the look on his own face; that puppyish, surprised look, so _grateful_ for the fleeting scraps of Connor’s attention.

‘Do you know this man?’ the cop asks. He taps his finger on the photo, forcing Oliver to look at it again.

‘Yes.’ _Answer the question, and only the question._

‘And who is he?’

‘His name’s Connor.’

‘Surname?’

Oliver hesitates. The cop takes another photo from the file on the desk and slides it to join the other. In this one, Oliver’s eyes are cast down into his drink. Bashful. _Pathetic._ Maybe Connor just complimented him. The details are hazy. His eyes back then were cast down, which meant he didn’t get to see the look on Connor’s face. Triumphant. From here, it looks like crosshairs, like a bird of prey. The only truly happy, uncorrupted moment of their whole wasted acquaintance – when Oliver could believe it was nothing more than what he saw before him, a hot guy flirting with him in a bar. Hindsight is a bitter, bitter thing.

‘Surname?’ the cop repeats, sharply.

‘Walsh,’ Oliver says. Betrayal is bitter, too.

‘And what is the nature of your relationship with Mr Walsh?’

Oliver’s gut twists. ‘Personal,’ he says, lips pursed tight around what he suspects might be a sob.

The cop leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his broad chest. ‘We’ve got him leaving your apartment building in the early hours of the morning on five – no, six – separate occasions, Oliver.’ They do that. Use your first name. Build up a relationship with the accused. Build trust. Then knock it down like cards. It’s an old trick.

Oliver says nothing. There was no question.

‘Is your relationship with Mr Walsh a sexual one?’

 _Last time I checked, that hasn’t been a crime in the state of Pennsylvania since 1980,_ he feels like saying. It’s what Connor might have said. Jaw set, brow arched. Lip curled. _Come at me. I dare you._

He doesn’t, though. Instead, he says, ‘I no longer have a relationship of any kind with Connor Walsh.’

The cop sighs. ‘I’ll rephrase. _Was_ your relationship with Mr Walsh sexual?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did this relationship involve application of your IT expertise in exchange for sexual gratification?’

‘No,’ Oliver says. Too quickly.

‘Did Connor Walsh _at any point_ in your acquaintance ask you to perform illegal acts in order to access information beneficial to him?’

The lawyer leans forward. ‘My client refuses to answer that question.’

‘He does, does he?’ the cop says. He takes a long drag of his coffee. It must be stone cold by now. ‘Come on, son,’ he says to Oliver, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m trying to give you a break. We know this guy’s dirty. Up to his neck in it. Just need a little push from you. Things’ll go easier.’

Oliver stares down at the table, at the dull reflection of the lone, dim lightbulb, and thinks about how things haven’t been easy for a long time.

*

Connor visits him three days in. Not a hair out of place. He swaggers into the bank of visitor’s booths as though he owns them.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Oliver whispers into the receiver.

Connor shrugs, slouched in his chair. _Here I am._

‘Checking I haven’t sold you out?’ Oliver says, and he’s hungry and tired and scared, so it comes out as a snarl. It cuts Connor – his shoulders drop minutely.

‘No,’ Connor says, leaning forward so he’s very close to the scratched-up plexi-glass. ‘No, Oliver. I came.’ He frowns, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘I came to see if you were okay.’

Oliver ducks his head, so Connor won’t see his mouth twist with the effort not to cry. He is always hiding his face from Connor. In case the truth gets out, the awful, predictable truth of how he feels.

‘I’m okay,’ he mumbles.

‘You. Why. I just don’t get why you wouldn’t…’

Oliver looks up, and Connor is frowning at him, puzzling him out, picking apart his sinews and bones, digging for the truth Oliver keeps wrapped up tight inside his chest.

‘Why I wouldn’t throw you to the wolves?’

Connor’s gaze flickers. ‘Yeah,’ he breathes. The receiver is faulty; there’s static on the line, as though they’re continents apart, rather than inches.

Oliver shrugs. ‘Guess I just thought…it’d make me as bad as you. And…and it’d mean that was all it was about. Us. It’d mean it was just about getting information, and not about. You know. Anything more.’

‘Oliver,’ Connor whispers. ‘It wasn’t just about getting information. You _know_ that.’

‘Well. I can keep hoping, at least.’

‘God. I’m gonna make this up to you,’ he says. ‘I promise I’m gonna make it right.’

He’s so contrite, and so unexpectedly  _kind,_ and his voice is low and laden with a sort of affection Oliver doesn’t dare try to name, and it settles so gently, so comfortingly in the pit of his stomach, that afterwards, curled up on the hard bench in his cell, Oliver thinks he must have dreamed the whole thing.

*

He can’t get _warm._ He keeps shivering, and he’s losing track of the days. He caves, eventually, and his father flies the family attorney down from Boston; a brusque, polished man who speaks with a clipped, hurried accent.

‘I will arrange for your release very shortly,’ he says. ‘I must ask you to have no further contact with Connor Walsh.’

_Not a dream, then._

‘Okay,’ Oliver says dumbly.

They’re as good as their word, both of them. His father’s lawyer gets him released on bail, and Oliver crushes the urge to run to Connor. It’s the only thing about those manic, tumbling weeks of which he’s proud – he was never the one doing the chasing. He never let himself go begging for Connor’s attention.

Oliver’s father comes to town, and Oliver could lie to him, could say _I was helping innocent people. I was fighting evil forces. I was doing what I thought was right._ But that’s not quite true, and he knows it. He knows he did it to keep Connor’s eyes fixed on him and only him. And even then it wasn’t enough.

His father is _disappointed,_ of course, but that’s nothing new. The sting fades quickly.

 _One last time, did Connor Walsh encourage or direct you to engage in illegal cyber activity?_ They ask him before he’s released.

 _No,_ he says, because any other answer would make a sham of every time they touched, lips and hands and cocks and skin.

*

The cops have dirt on Connor, his lawyer tells him. Trails of breadcrumbs that tie him to every red flag on Oliver’s file. Times and places and motives. Pretty maids all in a row. They could put him away for years.

But without Oliver’s testimony, nothing sticks. Annaliese Keating and her posse pull strings, deflect warrants, discredit witnesses, and the charges vanish into thin air.

An earnest African American boy with a perpetually surprised expression on his face visits Oliver, and Oliver tells him not to worry, he won’t turn Connor in, and the boy nods solemnly and stands to leave.

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ he says before he slips through the door. ‘Wouldn’t be anything he didn’t deserve.’

Oliver clenches his fingers around the edges of his seat. The urge to defend Connor is like the urge to breathe, relentless and unerring. He doesn’t know who he hates more for that; Connor, or himself.

*

By the time his lawyer gets the charges dropped, Oliver’s lost his job, and his apartment. He never does figure out what backroom deals and shady favours clear his name.

Connor never does make it up to him, either. Or maybe that’s his version of atonement – staying out of Oliver’s life. Draining out the poison. _Make it a clean break._ It’s a funny way of expressing gratitude, when Oliver wants Connor here _,_ in the grimy one-room apartment he’s subletting. Wants him _here,_ making it up to him with his mouth and with the brush of his hair against his shoulderblade and with the way his face looks young, angelic, in sleep.

He barely knows Connor, not really, but he knows how he operates, well enough, how he leaves destruction in his wake, and how he breaks hearts by allowing just a glimpse of what it could be like, at its most perfect, what it could be like to be loved by him.

The worst of it is, Oliver knows that, given the chance, he’d fall for it all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Pancho and Lefty."
> 
> This takes place in an alternate timeline which ignores the flashforwards in 1x04. Thanks for tolerating my horribly vague and generally misinformed legalese!


End file.
